I KNOW, TOMATO WEEK (FOOD FEST 4) doesn’t start till Thursday, when Deb from Dinner Tonight and I will be at it again, hoping to encourage you to share your tomato recipes and tips and links as you have for Pesto, Cukes & Zukes and Green Beans the previous Thursdays. But I got started a little early, which I’m blaming on Amy Goldman, the heirloom seed preservationist and gardener and cook (and near-neighbor) whose new book is indescribably juicy and luscious…and who I have an inclination might just stop in on Thursday to join us, too.
If you’ve seen Amy’s previous books on melons and squash, which like the newest volume are collaborations with photographer Victor Schrager, you know they are somewhere between scholarly and scientific and sensuous (which means they cover a lot of ground).
You can therefore go at reading “The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table” from any angle: Dip in, perhaps, to grab a recipe (Amy’s Cream of Tomato Soup is calling to me, as are Tomato Bread Pudding and her oven-dried Tomato Chips).
At another sitting, learn to grow tomatoes as expertly as Amy does (she tested an astonishing 1,000 varieties and profiles 200 in the book), or how to save the seed for next year’s crop.
Come to “The Heirloom Tomato” one day with a supply of envelopes and stamps (or logged into your computer) and write away for catalogs from her impressive source list, which puts my own to shame.
Or just try this, as I find myself doing again and again since the book arrived: Sit down whenever you simply need to smile.
I can’t help but react happily to paging through the portraits of all these creatures who call themselves tomatoes, despite their drastic differences. How can the tiny currant type, no bigger than a pea, and the
The website greengrove.cc is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.
When it comes to garden gear, there is a clear divide among growers: Those who love tomato cages, and those who consider them an absolute useless eyesore. I’m controversially the latter. Aesthetics aside, there are a lot of questions I have about the invention of this particular metal torture device, and I have opinions about how it might not be the best way to grow your tomatoes. In fact, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with your crops due to cage structure—increased pests and lower fruit production to start!
With all that in mind, I made my annual frantic call with some urgent tomato questions to today’s guest, Craig LeHoullier in North Carolina, the NC Tomato Man as he’s known on social media, author of the classic book, “Epic Tomatoes” (affiliate link). Craig knows more about these cherished fruits than almost anyone I’ve ever met. He even shares that in live sessions each week on his Instagram account where you can ask your questions and get solid answers. I asked Craig how he’s doing and what we should all be doing to bolster a bountiful harvest and also about which fruits to save next year’s seed from anyhow and other tomato questions. Read along a
Homegrown tomatoes taste heavenly when they are sweet with a hint of tart, acidic flavor. If you want to grow the same, there is a science behind it. Learn the Number One Technique to Produce Sweeter Tomatoes to enjoy a sweet summer harvest!
Up here in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires area, where the apples come in fast in fall, I make applesauce as fast as I can to freeze. A batch of mincemeat sounds about right, too, especially from a recipe minus the traditional beef suet. This one’s vegetarian.The recipe is from “Stocking Up II,” a Rodale cookbook of 1980s vintage that has since been reissued in athird version. The most-disfigured spread in my copy: the one with ‘Currant and Green Tomato Chutney,’ which uses loads of apples as well. If a waste-not, want-not mood seizes you in the not-too-distant future, here’s the recipe. (I fig
First, of course, you want to make sure the crop you’re considering saving seed from is open-pollinated, not a hybrid. Hybrids won’t “come true” from saved seed one generation to the next.“Start with the super-easy things,” said Ken, “like anything with a perfect flower and a pod—beans, and peas, for instance.” Perfect flowers contain both male and female parts, or stamens and pistils, such as lettuce, tomatoes, brassicas, beans; in imperfect ones, such as on squash and cucumbers, there are separate male and female flowers.“Before you even transplant your first seedling, you can start thinking about seed saving,” Ken said, and also wrote in a new article on the Seed Library blog.For beginning seed-
IT’S TOO EARLY HERE to start anything for the vegetable garden but leeks and onions, as I mentioned in the March chores, but it’s never too soon to brush up on seed-starting timing and tactics. To that end, a little refresher course:
THAT OLD, DISCARDED ELECTRIC FAN that isn’t strong enough for the hot summers of global warming…hey, bring it on. It’s perfect for accomplishing one of the tricks to growing better tomato seedlings, which is (after all) the only thing you probably really care about on the run-up to another spring. To hell with winter.
Easy does it: You don’t need a flat of cherry tomato plants; one or two is plenty for most households. Give the majority of space to paste tomatoes for making sauce, and others for eating fresh in salads and sliced.Hybrids or heirlooms? A mix is better, probably, as hybrids sometimes fare better under duress than heirlooms, which don’t have the benefit of bred-in disease resistance. (That’s‘Juliet,’ a delicious and prolific hybrid small plum, up top, for instance.)At planting-out time, rotate the crop to minimize the chance of soil-borne troubles. A th
THERE ARE OTHER people who can show you step-by-step how they start tomatoes from seed, but I have two little secrets: 1, APS System, and 2, control yourself. The former is a self-watering system of styrofoam cells that will last forever and I think of as an essential garden tool.
ROBIN REDBREAST is a classic symbol of spring, the early bird who catches the worm, but in my northern garden, the flock stays in view in winter just as long as the holly and crabapple fruit lasts. I miss their happy song when they finally push back from the buffet, and miss the oddball run-and-stop, run-and-stop movements of North America’s most widespread thrush.
All of it will be grown organically, starting with organically farmed seed, like in her family farm and home garden (below). “Our seed system is brittle,” says Theresa, who farms in Fullerton, North Dakota, on the cusp of Zone 3b and 4a. Not brittle in the way a perfectly dry seed must be to store well over the winter for next season–but brittle as in ecologically and politically fragile, and potentially broken.We’ve all heard: Years of industry consolidation by a few big corporations has reduced the d